They are characters that are supposed to be displayed as text by default, if my understanding of Unicode is correct. If you copy/paste them like I did they will be displayed as text but if you input them with an emoji selector they should be displayed as emoji.

If you copy/paste them like I did they will be displayed as text but if you input them with an emoji selector they should be displayed as emoji.

That's not true - in the first case you're dealing with Emoji characters, in the latter you're just dealing with pictures. Just look at all the posts here: I'm unable to copy what it's all about, because those are pictures, not characters anymore. The only advantage of pictures is that they look the same in every client and on every OS.

We may be talking about different things. I'm talking about Unicode variation selectors VS15 and VS16, or U+FE0E and U+FE0F respectively.

If someone copy/pastes a text, say, a press release that mentions "PlayStation®" it shouldn't be displayed as "PlayStation" where the ®︎ part has been turned into an emoji. That's because U+00AE (REGISTERED SIGN) is meant to be displayed as text by default, not as an emoji. If it's entered via an emoji selector it should be inserted as U+00AE U+FE0F (two codepoints) to indicate that it should be displayed as an emoji. They don't seem to be doing that consistently though.

I thought emojis required characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), (being 4 byte characters) and therefore in MySQL require the utf8mb4 character set, which isn't set by default, and is only available in versions >= 5.3.3. If that is correct would not a check on the database type, version, and character set used need to be made before allowing emojis?